Tangier Island, in the middle of Chesapeake Bay.CreditCreditAndrew Moore for The New York Times

Feature

Should the United States Save Tangier Island From Oblivion?

It’s the kind of choice that climate change will be forcing over and over.

Tangier Island, in the middle of Chesapeake Bay.CreditCreditAndrew Moore for The New York Times

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By Jon Gertner

July 6, 2016

It was a few minutes before noon on Tangier Island in Virginia, just about high tide, when David Schulte pushed the toe of his red sneaker into Marilyn Pruitt’s soggy backyard. Schulte, a marine biologist with the United States Army Corps of Engineers, frowned, withdrew his foot, found another spot nearby and pressed his toe down again. His sneaker sank into the ground, and water pooled around it. “It’s like that all the time,” Pruitt called out from her back porch. “It doesn’t dry out anymore.”

Schulte looked up at Pruitt, then crouched down to look closer. There were small holes in the ground, spaced about six inches apart, filled with clear water. “Fiddler crabs,” he said. He stood up, turned and walked to the periphery of Pruitt’s property, where the yard was rimmed by a thicket of wild, knee-high spartina grasses, matted by wind and salt spray. As I followed Schulte, it felt as if we were walking on a sponge. Every step squished and slurped. “This isn’t even a yard anymore,” Schulte told me. “I mean, it’s technically more like a marsh, a wetland.”

From where we stood, a few hundred feet from the shoreline, the view was postcard-perfect. White fishing boats dotted the Chesapeake Bay under a hazy March sky; the eastern shore of Maryland formed a dark, distant stripe on the horizon some 14 miles away. “Sometimes I think we were crazy to build a house out here,” Pruitt told me earlier. “But I guess there are worse places to get stuck.” The real estate market was stalled, she meant, and her family had been unable to sell the property. But it was also the case that she built the house in a place where the bay was steadily advancing on her backyard every year, usually by about a dozen feet. In bad times — when a nor’easter stormed through, say — great chunks of Tangier were torn off. But even in calmer conditions, the losses were steady and seemingly unstoppable. Week by week, wave by wave, grain by grain, Tangier was washing away.

Schulte first visited the island in 2002, when the corps asked him to look into the restoration of some nearby oyster beds. “My first impression was just how low everything on Tangier was,” he recalled. Most of the island, which consists of several long sandy ridges connected by footbridges and amounts to a little over a square mile, is about four or five feet above sea level. The low elevations and the quiet, bird-filled wetlands and tidal creeks produce a sense of living with the water, rather than beside it. Schulte has returned to Tangier several times over the past decade to track its health. Last year, when some money became available at the corps to research the impact of climate change on coastal areas, he and a couple of colleagues began a study on Tangier, believing that this tiny island might also yield insights into the vulnerability of cities and towns all along the Eastern Seaboard. They concluded that Tangier had lost two-thirds of its landmass since 1850. To scientists who study the Chesapeake, this was not surprising: Over the past four centuries, Schulte estimates, more than 500 islands have disappeared from the bay, about 40 of them once inhabited. The most striking aspect of the Tangier research, however, was how bleak the island’s future looked.

Some of its troubles are the result of the same forces behind sea-level rises everywhere. Warmer global temperatures make oceans bigger — a process known as thermal expansion — and thus increase sea levels; at the same time, land-based glaciers around the world, along with the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica, are melting into the ocean. “But they’ve got it worse here,” Schulte said. Tangier’s location in the center of the bay, along with its friable turf of sand and silt, leaves it dangerously exposed and fragile. What’s more, the land in and around the Chesapeake is sinking, because of lingering effects from geological events dating back 20,000 years. “They’re just in a very untenable position,” Schulte said. “And they don’t have any options right now other than something big to turn them around.” A very big construction project, in short.

Schulte’s study of Tangier, published online in the journal Nature last year, concluded that the island might have 50 years left and that its residents were likely to become some of the first climate-change refugees in the continental United States. Tangier was not necessarily a lost cause: Schulte outlined a rough engineering plan, costing around $30 million, that involved break­waters, pumped-in sand and new vegetation that could preserve the island. What his paper couldn’t possibly resolve, though, were the immense economic and political obstacles involved in saving an obscure place from oblivion precisely when big East Coast cities were seeking hundreds of millions of federal dollars for storm-surge protection. Indeed, as seas rise and scientists fine-tune their projections for an era of floods — large parts of Miami Beach, according to some predictions, may be uninhabitable by around 2050 — Tangier’s situation represents an early glimpse of a problem so enormously complex, so “wicked,” in the argot of social scientists, it seems to defy resolution.

There will be dozens of Miamis and thousands of Tangiers. “The Outer Banks, the Delmarva Peninsula, Long Island, the Jersey Shore — they’re in the same boat,” Schulte said. “It’s going to just take a little longer for them to get to where Tangier is now.” An excruciating question is how we will decide which coastal communities to rescue and which to relinquish to the sea. But a number of other difficulties attend those decisions. How do we re-engineer the land, roads and neighborhoods of the places deemed worthy of salvation? How do we relocate residents whose homes can’t (or won’t) be saved? Also, there’s the money problem. A recent study, commissioned by the Risky Business Project, an initiative led by Henry Paulson, Michael Bloomberg and the hedge-fund billionaire and philanthropist Tom Steyer, concluded that as much as a half-trillion dollars’ worth of coastal property in the United States could be under water by the end of the century. And that figure doesn’t include the cost of further encroachments by flooding. As Skip Stiles, the head of Wetlands Watch, a Virginia nonprofit that focuses on coastal preservation and sea-level rise, puts it, “Is there even enough money in the world to buy out — to make whole — everybody’s investment that’s going to get soggy?”

After we left Marilyn Pruitt’s yard, Schulte and I walked through town together. We dodged resi­dents driving golf carts on the narrow roadways — there are very few automobiles on Tangier — and hopped over a number of large puddles. We made our way to Lorraine’s, the only restaurant open in the colder months. “I’m thinking, from what I see today, that 50 years may be optimistic,” Schulte said. At this rate, he wondered if Tangier had even 25.

Renee Tyler, Tangier’s town manager, works in an office next to the airport, in a prefabricated building topped with solar panels. The first thing Tyler said to Schulte when we visited her was: “I wish we could just stick something under the island and just pump it up. You know, inflate it.” She and Schulte discussed how the Army Corps was planning to build a small jetty on the northwestern side of the island in 2018. But it’s a modest project, she told me, and the jetty is not likely to mitigate the worsening floods. So something far more involved, something resembling Schulte’s plan, is needed. The problem is that the island is too poor to fund the work on its own. Tangier — population 470 — is steadfastly working class, with a median household income of about $40,000. “I started a campaign on generosity.com for donations,” Tyler, a blunt 51-year-old former Marine, said. “We don’t have any billionaires here.”

I asked her if the town could borrow money to pay for sea walls or breakers. “There’s no way we’d be able to pay that back,” she said. “Not in our lifetime or our kids’ lifetime.” What about a one-time tax assessment? Tyler shook her head. “Nope. Not here. We’re starting from nothing.”

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An empty lot on Tangier Island shows just how high the local water table has risen.CreditAndrew Moore for The New York Times

That appears to leave the island at the mercy of the state and federal governments — and in particular, the Army Corps of Engineers, which would probably shoulder the burden of any large-scale construction effort. But understanding the process by which the corps gets involved with places like Tangier also helps explain why the island probably faces some rough years ahead. Schulte works out of the corps’s district office in Norfolk, in a squat modern building where I visited him a few weeks before we met on Tangier. He and a number of his superiors made a convincing case to me that the corps is increasingly focused on climate change; the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, for instance, recently led the agency to make a thorough assessment of risks to the United States’ North Atlantic coast and to identify potential new flood-control projects. The district commander, Col. Jason Kelly, told me that some of the reflexive tendencies of the corps to build big dams and dikes — the old rallying cry, as he put it, of “Let’s get the concrete going!” — are now enhanced by holistic (and, often, cheaper) ways of managing floodwaters, by installing natural defenses like marshlands and dunes, say.

The corps employs roughly 32,000 civilians and about 700 military personnel; the list of projects it oversees around the country runs to nearly 200 pages. Yet by the standards of federal agencies, the corps’s civil-works budget — the money used for the construction, operations and maintenance of domestic, nonmilitary engineering projects — is not large, topping off at just under $5 billion last year. Most of that funding goes to maintain navigable waterways, marine ecosystems and dams; only a fraction is directed to coastal flood work. Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime observer of the agency, told me the corps was “always working on a pretty thin shoestring. And they’re always in this tension between what can be done and what should be done.”

The corps does not have complete control over its agenda. Rather, it responds to requests from towns and cities and to the instructions of fed­eral lawmakers. Essentially, there are two routes a community can take to initiate the corps’s partici­pation, and each takes time. The first is to seek help for smaller projects, under about $10 million each, that are judged important by the corps leader­ship and can be funded out of the corps’s annual budget, provided that costs will be shared by a state, county or township. A good example is the small jetty for Tangier, which is meant to preserve a navigation channel and will be paid for by the corps and the state of Virginia. But amid so many other competing state and federal projects, that money has taken decades to secure: The jetty was first proposed in the mid-1990s.

Bigger projects are even more complicated. The week before we met, Kelly said, the corps agreed to conduct a major flood-management study on behalf of Norfolk, which is already suffering so many floods that some of the city’s arterial roads are routinely shut down after storms. Unlike Schulte’s brief scientific assessment on Tangier, major studies like the one for Norfolk need to be authorized by Congress, typically through something known as a Water Resources Development Act bill. After authorization, the study process takes several years and millions of dollars, but it is the crucial step that precedes any large Army Corps construction project. In Norfolk’s case, the eventual work — funded jointly by the city and federal governments — might take a decade or more and might involve building sea walls, breakwaters, marshlands and pumps. Judging by other big flood-management projects, it might also cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, that could prove a bargain for Norfolk if the results significantly reduce the city’s risk of flooding. Compared with the cost of fed­eral emergency assistance, along with the potential harm done to the city’s tax revenue, hundreds of millions for storm-surge protection isn’t so much.

Politics seems to play an outsize role in shaping the corps’s priorities. Every few years, a small number of Washington legislators privately debate a large number of potential Army Corps projects for a new WRDA bill — and a powerful member of Congress can often push a pet project to the top of the list. “Everybody jostles and gets in line,” J. David Rogers, a geological engineer at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, told me. “So if you come out on the top of the WRDA cake, your work gets done. And if it doesn’t, your work doesn’t get done.” Michael Oppenheimer, a professor at Princeton who studies the intersection of climate change and policy, told me that Beltway deals are only part of the problem. The corps exists within a larger government system that focuses more on storm repairs than on preparation and adaptation, and there seems to be no immediate prospect for creating a national organization that can proactively address the coastal problems caused by climate change. “This is all patchwork,” he says. And our safety web of policies and agencies — the corps was founded in 1779 — predates an age when rising sea levels posed existential threats.

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David Schulte, from the Army Corps of Engineers, on the beach in what’s left of the Tangier region called Uppards.CreditAndrew Moore for The New York Times

To act quickly, wealthy cities like New York have begun to largely self-fund their waterfront defenses. But the United States has more than 88,000 miles of shoreline; roughly five million people and 2.6 million homes are situated less than four feet above high tide. Considering that the corps already strains under its present workload, it’s hard to know who or what will come to the aid of less affluent towns when sea levels are three or four feet higher than today. Tangier’s prospects seemed to dim even as I listened to Kelly explain his protocol and heard how many cities compete for the corps’s limited funds.

“We know Tangier has to compete with other projects,” Tyler said. “But we feel — I don’t know, is ‘inconsequential’ the right word? We feel that we’re not a priority, that we’re too small to make a difference.” Tyler said she hadn’t given up, but she was worried. “We really have not thought of Plan B,” she told me. “Or it may be that Plan B scares me.”

Repeatedly she told me, “Time is running out.” And all around Tangier, I had the sense that unlike most seaside towns, where the pace of life tends toward the languorous, clocks were ticking faster than everywhere else. When I walked about the island with Schulte, he was buttonholed by one resident after another and asked a variation of “When are you going to start building a sea wall?” Knowing how tricky the funding proc­ess can be, he would respond that the soonest anything could happen — “at best” — might be a few years. He sometimes looked pained as he said it. Later he told me: “I grew up in a steel-mill town outside of Pittsburgh. And I remember that feeling when all the steel mills started shutting down, that feeling that there was no viable future. It must be the same here, but on Tangier it’s the land itself that’s the problem.”

For any large-scale project, the corps needs to identify what Kelly calls a “legitimate national interest.” The national interest can sometimes be framed in economic and military terms — in Norfolk, preserving the city’s shipping port, which also hosts the country’s largest naval base. In other places, crucial ecosystem restoration or, in rarer instances, historical preservation, may justify the corps’s involvement. Schulte’s arguments for saving Tangier are a mix of these. “It’s the last offshore fishing community in Virginia, literally the last one standing,” he told me over dinner one evening. “We lose parts of America when we lose places like this.” The island was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. Tangier’s community has been there for hundreds of years, Schulte notes — the island was mainly settled by several families from Cornwall and Devon, England, in the 1700s and 1800s, and their heritage is still discernible in the residents’ unusual accent, a Colonial-era Cornwall patois wrapped inside a Virginia twang that has long drawn the attention of linguists and anthropologists. That accent would disappear if the island were lost. Schulte made the economic case too. Tangier’s sea grass (known as subaqueous vegetation beds) and wetlands have significant ecological worth. The subaqueous vegetation beds are where blue crabs reach maturity, and migrating birds rest on the wetlands. The vegetation cleanses the water and air. He has calculated the “ecosystem value” of Tangier to be millions of dollars annually.

The descendants of the island’s early English settlers continue to work on crab and oyster boats. When the town was founded, its fishermen, known here as watermen, had no idea that ecological disaster would threaten the island. “It’s not like someone who builds in a floodplain intentionally, knowing that there’s this chance,” Schulte said. “So I feel that these people should get some help.” He added that the problem was not just a few houses: “It’s the whole town.” Re-establishing them on the mainland would be expensive. “Let’s say we do nothing and let the island go away, and then move everybody. How do we deal with that? It’s not going to be a cheap undertaking, and it’s going to be well beyond what the people there can pay.” His bottom line was that bringing the island back to health could be cost-effective as well as virtuous.

Schulte did not take the challenges of fixing Tangier lightly, though. He brought up the example of Poplar Island, a spot in the Chesapeake some 60 miles north of Tangier, to explain why. Within the small community of engineers and scientists who spend their days thinking about how to save entire islands or coastal cities from vanishing during this century, Poplar looms greatly. In the late 1800s, it was home to Valliant, a small village with a post office, a school and 100 residents. Unfortunately, Valliant also had a sawmill. In cutting down the island’s trees for lumber, the islanders destroyed the root system holding their soil together. By around 1920, Valliant was abandoned. And by the 1990s, Poplar Island shrank from about 1,200 acres to five acres and was on the cusp of extinction.

I went to Poplar, which is about two miles from Maryland’s eastern shore, in late March, accompanied by Justin Callahan, a project manager for the corps’s Baltimore division. He first traveled to Poplar in 1993, when it was just a tiny sandbar. “We’re at 1,140 acres now,” he told me during the boat ride over, “and ultimately we’ll be expanding it to a total of 1,715 acres.” The island is being resurrected, and what you find on Poplar now is a public-works project on a biblical scale, rising out of the Chesapeake. In 2003, the corps began building a boomerang-shaped dike as the island’s new perimeter. This “hard” boundary was composed of sand piles covered with a strong textile material and topped with crushed stone and huge, 2,000-pound boulders. Since then, the corps has been filling the pools inside the perimeter wall with silt dredged from the channels leading into Baltimore Harbor and carted here by scow 24 hours a day during active periods of construction. The dredging of the channels would have occurred anyway — it’s necessary to keep the port deep enough for large cargo ships — but ordinarily the silt would be dumped out in the ocean. By depositing it here, the state of Maryland, which owns Poplar, gets a better harbor and a new island. When it’s finished, in 2040 or so, Poplar will be a wildlife sanctuary devoid of residents.

“A lot of what you usually see with the corps is known as ‘pump and dump,’ ” Callahan said once we reached the island. He was dressed in jeans and work boots, and he quickly borrowed a truck to give me a tour. We drove past a long line of trailers that serve as offices for the roughly 25 workers who come here daily — no one stays overnight — before turning onto a main dirt road that runs along the spine of the new island. “ ‘Pump and dump’ means you dredge it, deposit it and walk away,” he continued. “But this is different. A tremendous amount of engineering went into this.” Half the island is being sculpted into wetlands, Callahan said, pointing to low-lying areas to my right, which had already been planted with spartina grass and were starting to flourish. The other half of the island will be dry “uplands.” These were on Callahan’s left. Some of the upland hills have already been built to about 17 feet above sea level, on the way to about 25 feet, according to Callahan, a height that should fortify the island. In time, the uplands will be planted with pine trees. The corps will in effect undo the error that the residents of Poplar made 100 years ago.

As we drove along, Callahan pointed out a pipe three feet in diameter running alongside the road. It carried dredged material pumped from Poplar’s bulkhead, where ships arrived with the silt carried from Baltimore channels, to the places being “infilled” on Poplar. Callahan parked at the end of the pipe so we could see the silt pour out into a roadside pool. It was black and viscous. Over the next few weeks, as the dark soup pooled higher and higher, water would drain out, the sediment would dry and settle and the process would then be repeated until the area reached the desired elevation. Surrounded by the dust and the noise of machinery, it was hard to picture the green idyll of the future. The whole place smelled like mud.

Poplar will ultimately cost about $1.4 billion — or roughly $800,000 per acre. Earlier, Tan­gier’s town manager, Renee Tyler, told me: “What baffles me the most is that no one lives on Poplar. And they spent all this money on it. We have people who live here, as well as sea life and birds.” Yet there are a number of reasons, some of them bureaucratic and obscure, that get in the way of using Baltimore harbor’s silt to build up Tangier. This is Maryland’s mud, not Virginia’s, and Poplar (unlike Tangier) has the good fortune to lie within Maryland’s waters. Another factor that works in Poplar’s favor: the project has a defensible, cost-benefit appeal. “If you want to do ecosystem restoration on a large scale,” Callahan told me on the boat ride back, “it’s expensive, so it has to have a big economic driver.” Here, the economic driver involves the effort to preserve the port of Baltimore, “which is just a huge regional economic engine.” That’s what makes it difficult for Tangier, he added. No one would dispute that Tangier had a unique fishing culture and history, he remarked.

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Poplar Island, near Baltimore, is being rebuilt from almost nothing using dredged harbor mud. But Tangier’s rescue is not so simple.CreditAndrew Moore for The New York Times

“It has no harbor project, though,” Callahan said. Then he added, rhetorically, “What is the economic driver for Tangier?”

One afternoon on Tangier, I stopped by the fire station to visit Anna Pruitt-Parks, a member of the Town Council and also Tangier’s paramedic. Pruitt-Parks grew up on the island, and as a teenager she thought about leaving. “But when you get Tangier mud between the toes,” she told me, “it’s hard to go.” She lives with her husband and children in her grandparents’ house. For more than 40 years, she said, the house never flooded, but several recent storms brought water in. “We’ve since had it elevated so it doesn’t flood, and we had our land graded,” she explained. But she sees the land all around Tangier sinking and eroding. Her 12-year-old son told her that he wants to be a waterman. “I don’t know if that will be possible,” she told me, “but that’s what he wants.” When I asked if she thought Tangier could provide a future for her children, she said: “If all of the wheels turn that need to turn, I do believe that we can be saved, and even built back up — not necessarily to the size we were 200 years ago. But if you look at projects like Poplar Island, it is possible.”

What is vexing for Tangierians is that their local challenges, as difficult as they seem, may pale next to their broader, long-term problems. “It will take two things to save the island,” David Schulte says. “One is to engineer and repair it now. The other is to make sure that the worst-case scenario of climate change doesn’t happen, because I’ve seen what that looks like in the computer modeling, and we don’t want to go there. A lot of Norfolk is under water. Miami is under water.” Tangier, too. For the moment, the world is on course for the worst-case impacts of sea-level rise — perhaps up to six feet by 2100, a result of carbon dioxide pushing up temperatures and the polar ice sheets pouring meltwater into the oceans. At the same time, the forces that make the Chesapeake area so vulnerable (the region currently experiences about five millimeters of relative sea-level rise annually, significantly more than the global annual average of three millimeters) will not be getting any better. “The land is likely to be sinking for many thousands of years,” says Paul Bierman, a scientist at the University of Vermont who has studied the area’s geology.

The Gulf Stream presents another problem. At present, this circulation of warm water in the Atlantic Ocean produces variations in sea level. The surface of the Atlantic is about 60 centimeters lower off the coast of New Jersey than it is off Bermuda, according to Robert Kopp, a professor at Rutgers. If the Gulf Stream weakens, Kopp says, as it is expected to do in a warmer climate, then the differences in sea level will equalize. Oceans will be even higher in the Mid-Atlantic region. This portends trouble not only for the Chesapeake, but also for Long Island and the Jersey Shore. And water will meanwhile be seeping into other urban centers. A recent study by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that several dozen American cities — including Boston, New Haven and Savannah, Ga. — could suffer more than 50 floods per year by about 2045 if they don’t take serious measures to mitigate the rising tides; at least a dozen other places, including Philadelphia and Wilmington, N.C., may flood more than 150 times a year. If federal lawmakers find that hard to believe, they will see proof out the window: Parts of Washington could be inundated 388 times a year.

To Chris Moore, a senior scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, “we’re not anywhere near the point where we need to write off an entire community.” Still, the science suggests that it may soon be time to consider which towns, islands and cities can (or cannot) be saved. This, in turn, prompts some hard thinking about which criteria — economic wealth, population density, natural appeal, historical value — should weigh most heavily in those decisions. “It’s just a sad fact that we can’t spend an infinite amount of money defending the coast,” Michael Oppenheimer, the Princeton professor, says. “And the concept of retreat, which is sort of un-American, has to be normalized. It has to become part of the culture. Because there are some places where we’re really going to have to retreat.”

I asked Skip Stiles, of Wetlands Watch, if there were reasons to spend vast sums on flood defenses even when long-term outcomes looked bleak. He surprised me by saying that some kind of investment could be an essential part of a regional or national strategy. Short-term fixes, even expensive ones, could allow residents and governments to make choices about how to help or resettle people; a sudden annihilation of hope, on the other hand, could destroy a town’s real estate values and tax base. You’d have a rapid exodus, another Poplar Island. Ben Strauss of Climate Central, a research organization based in Princeton, N.J., seems to agree. “A coastal community can understand that its life can be limited by future sea-level rises,” he told me, “but that shouldn’t stop it from having a vital presence today.” He also thinks it’s conceivable that if the country’s most threatened communities can address their potential demise as fairly as possible, they could serve as exemplars. “That’s a huge gift to other communities,” he says, “because this is going to be a widely shared problem.”

For the moment, though, the notion of managed decline is mostly just an idea. When Schulte’s research on Tangier came out, some of the islanders came up with the idea of distributing T-shirts that read “I refuse to become a climate-change refugee.” When Schulte and I went downtown one afternoon to meet with Carol Moore-Pruitt, a native of Tangier who helped create the shirts, she told him: “I don’t know anything about climate change. But if calling me a climate-change refugee gets me a sea wall, then go ahead, call me a climate-change refugee.”

If the residents of Tangier want to look for insights into how their world might end, they can go to the northern edge of their island, to an area known as Uppards. Though it was connected to the rest of Tangier a century ago, Uppards is now a water-soaked parcel of land separated from the inhabited, southern part of the island by a broad navigation channel used by watermen. One day on Tangier, Schulte accepted an invitation from a visitor named Ron Kesner to see Tangier and Uppards by air, in Kesner’s single-engine Cessna, and I tagged along. Kesner is a resident of the Virginia mainland who has been visiting Tangier regularly for several years with his wife, Jodi Jones Smith, a coastal scientist, to study the island’s erosion. On a crisp afternoon with breathtaking visibility, we took off from Tangier’s small airport, climbed to a thousand feet and began to circle the island.

From above, it looked like the remains of an island — a dun-colored triangle with so many small ponds and streams it seemed like a large perforated leaf floating on a glassy green sea. If you looked closely, you could also see sandbars in the shallow waters surrounding it; as recently as 50 years ago, some of these were above sea level, and home to houses and beaches. They were now under five or 10 feet of water.

“It’s really been cut to shreds, hasn’t it?” Kesner said.

“And we’re a couple hours past high tide, too,” Schulte replied. He hadn’t seen the island from the air for a decade, he remarked, and the “ponding” all over worried him. It suggested that water was not only leaching in from the shorelines but was bubbling up from underneath Tangier too. “Wow,” he said, his face nearly pressed to the window. “They are on the edge.”

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The view from Long Bridge Road on Tangier Island.CreditAndrew Moore for The New York Times

As we circled the Uppards area just north of Tangier, Schulte asked me: “Do you see that line running along the center?” That was once a road, he said. It had connected a small village known as Canaan, at the northern tip of Uppards, to Tangier village.

Canaan is gone. It was abandoned around 1920, when the villagers, roughly 120 of them, left. Rather than physical deterioration, it seems to have been social erosion — not enough churchgoers and students, according to a report by the National Park Service — that hastened the town’s end. Many of the 35 houses on Uppards were moved to Tangier’s village, where some still remain. A few, however, were left behind to be taken by the sea. Only one photograph of Canaan exists, from a 1910 magazine article. Instead there are recollections, passed down to Tangier residents like Anna Pruitt-Parks, whose great-grandmother lived in Canaan.

A few hours after I saw Uppards from the air, I visited the area by boat with Schulte and Carol Moore-Pruitt, who also traces her roots to Canaan. Over the past few years, she has come to be regarded as its unofficial historian, the keeper not only of shards of information about the inhabitants — “It used to be beautiful green grass, chickens, roses, fig trees,” she told me — but also of physical fragments that wash up where the town once stood. She told me that 10 years ago she found an English whiskey bottle from the 1600s. One lingering problem with Uppards is that the remnants of the Canaan cemetery, now half underwater, have proved difficult to collect and move. Though some bodies have been relocated, bones and parts of coffins continue to wash into the tide regularly. Pruitt-Parks told me that once she was waiting for a ferry on Tangier’s dock and saw a femur on a nearby bank.

Canaan — and Uppards Island — matter to the people of Tangier for two reasons. The first is that even in its tattered state, it protects the rest of Tangier from the erosive northern currents of the Chesapeake. As our boat drew nearer, Schulte told me he thinks Uppards is now losing about 10 feet of shoreline a year. And, he said, “If you lose Uppards, you lose the town of Tangier, because then the town would be unsheltered.”

The second reason residents care about Uppards is that it represents a possible future. “I’m not a pessimist,” Moore-Pruitt told me. “But I see what’s happening. Without a sea wall on the east side, or a sea wall on the west side, Tangier will just be in the history books. It will be like this place, like Uppards.” We had come ashore from her small boat. She looked around and spread her arms and said, “But isn’t it beautiful?”

It was indeed — but also windswept, lonesome, strange. She began leading us past tidal pools and along the beach, a mix of silt and peat held together by the thin roots of marsh grasses. The lapping of the Chesapeake was ripping away the peat at the water’s edge. As Moore-Pruitt narrated, we walked by piles of oyster shells — middens, most likely, dating back to Native American settlers — and soon came upon a large scattering of red bricks, smoothed and made porous by time and weather, that had probably served as the foundation of Canaan’s homes. Not far away was a large iron ring, sunk into the mud, which marked the top of an old freshwater well. All around us were old bottles and dead bushes and gnarled stumps, including the skeleton of a large fig tree. “That died three years ago,” Moore-Pruitt said, blaming the intrusion of saltwater, which made survival for most plants difficult. Beyond the fig tree were a number of weathered marble headstones from the old Canaan graveyard, lying flat on the beach. Schulte began turning them over to read the inscriptions. The familiar Tangier names — the old families that had come here from Cornwall hundreds of years ago — still echoed: Margaret Pruitt, Polly Parks.

Moore-Pruitt led us farther eastward. Over the next few weeks, I thought of her many times — this woman who takes her small boat to Uppards almost every day, weather permitting, to walk the beach, stepping gingerly over fallen headstones while searching for bottles and buttons or taking a moment to appreciate the blooms of a dying rosebush planted by someone (an ancestor?) more than a century ago. Sometimes, she told me, especially in summer, she brings along her grandchildren to help her gather things exposed by the tide, even though, as she put it, “the sun is so hot you can barely stand it.” She had found toy marbles and old coins and coffin handles; she had also discovered arrowheads and a Native American ax head of smoothed stone that must have preceded the settlement of Canaan by many centuries. But every week, she said, there was a bit less land and brush. And every visit was an effort to gather the final, sodden artifacts of a place that would vanish, almost completely, within a few years.

We walked for a while more. Eventually, we reached an area beyond the remains of Canaan where the empty beach stretched through mud, marsh grass and scattered oyster shells. Schulte said he wanted to keep going farther, along the eastern shore of Uppards, and Moore-Pruitt agreed to return later in her boat to pick him up. Schulte said that he thought he might have seen a living pine tree during the flight on the Cessna. “I want to go see if I can find it.”

Standing on the beach, Moore-Pruitt said, “Sometimes it’s so hard to imagine this was a town.”

“It’s like no one ever lived here,” Schulte replied. Then he turned and began walking to find the last tree.